A two-parter:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

– Frédéric Bastiat

There are few options open to the rump core of an empire after resource extraction is no longer effectively free. Intentionally becoming more isolated, stagnant, and falling behind neighbouring nations, while also experiencing reveries about a halcyon past is, I think, an unresolved contradiction.

A pragmatic, self-interested approach to keeping the lights on in a country with an ageing population and no longer any manufacturing capabilities would surely attempt to appeal to international workers in a form of ‘trade’, i.e. an exchange of labour for goods and services, benefits, citizenship.

It would be tantamount to self-sabotage, given the available options, to spend so many remaining resources on making immigration to the rump core of the empire as difficult and undesirable as possible.

-Nate O.

Chronological vs kairotic time:

• Engineering is grounded in chronos;  science is grounded in kairos.
• “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
• “Why was I able to stop smoking the 26th time I tried when the previous 25 I failed?”

What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”

– Samuel Gompers, 1893

Liberalism can’t “do” anything one way or the other; it has no agency, being a variegated body of political thought developed over centuries.

– Matthew Sitman

Expanding on the Mr. Sitman’s point, neither can conservatism.  (The context for his comment was a complaint about the state of the world and that liberalism hasn’t produced a better outcome.)  Liberals and conservatives can do things – or not do things or act to prevent things from happening, as they are so included.   Politics is a maker’s endeavor not a consumer activity.

“What I am against… is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed… at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves.”

-Wendell Berry

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”

-Clarence Darrow